Red Cabbage in Winter and Jams galore 18/5/13

At this time of year there is nothing better for dinner than some braised Red Cabbage and Apple. I made a big batch of this last night. With a little bacon and fennel seeds to start things off, add some sliced onion and apple and chunks of red cabbage. Pour in some balsamic vinegar, put the lid on and slowly cook for an hour.  How good it tastes. This is a great side dish or good enough for a meal in itself.

The jam cupboard is looking a bit bare at the moment and the freezer is full so what better way to spend the day than making an assortment of jams from the summer's harvest.

First a mixture of raspberry, loganberry, blueberry, strawberry and black currant to make a Summer berry jam.

Next on the list was a Blueberry and Passionfruit Jam. Not a combination I would have thought of but I found it in one of my recipe books.

Last on the list was to do something with the feijoa crop. There have been a few sitting in a bowl in the kitchen for the past week or so but then today I found some more under the tree today. Enough to make into a couple of pots of jam. As the feijoa tastes a bit like pineapple, I thought it would team nicely with passionfruit as well.

So at the end of the day, there were 10 new pots to put in the cupboard. That should last us for a while.

Deliciously Dried Apples April 23rd 2013

I have so many apples this year that I have been looking for new things to do with them. Rather than let the possums gradually nibble their way through the entire crop hanging on the tree, I have harvested them all over the past couple of weeks. Now they are sitting in boxes in a previously empty fridge in another building on the farm. Hopefully this will act like a cool room and they will last us for several months in good condition.

Roaming around the second hand shops in town, I found one of these apple peeler/slicer/corer gadgets for a good price.

The hardest part is to get the apple centred.

Wind the handle and magically the apple gets peeled sliced and cored.

 Perfect I thought  for doing all the peeling and chopping required to make dried apple rings. A hiking friend told me about being given some delicious dried apple rings sprinkled with cinnamon when she was walking in the South west of Tasmania so I thought that would be a recipe worth trying.

After a few practices, I worked out how the peeler worked and got down to business. Rather than individual slices, they turned out  like an apple slinky but a quick slice through turned the slinky into numerous slices. Apples oxidise really quickly when cut so I once I put them through the gadget I immediately put them in some acidulated water (water with a bit of lemon juice) while I did the next apple. Then it was onto the dryer trays, sprinkle with cinnamon and leave to dry for several hours. They took about 6-8 hours to get to a pliable leathery texture and  I kept removing ones as they got to that point, not wanting to overdry them to the point where they were crisp. The result is very tasty and I look forward to eating them on hikes in the future if they don’t get eaten before that!

 We had a French couchsurfer staying with us over the weekend and when she saw all the silverbeet in the garden offered to cook us lunch. This is a recipe from the south of France for a silverbeet pancake. I didn’t write down the name so have forgotten what she called it. It was a vivid green so looked great accompanied by a multi coloured salad.

For any readers of this blog who are return visitors, I now have a subscribe gadget on the right hand side of the page. No idea if it works so if anyone tries it, can you leave a comment for me.

A Fruity Glut, or is that a Fruit Glutton? April 9th 2013

I have been a bit neglectful of this blog of late. That is not because I haven't been doing anything but more that I am just repeating things I have already posted about.

We have so much fruit ripening at the moment it is hard to keep up with it.  All the peaches are picked and while a couple of kilo are still sitting in a bowl in the fridge, I have bottled, jammed, stewed, dried and eaten lots already. The Golden Queen variety that I grow is a clingstone which makes it more fiddly to stone them to do things with but the flavour is magnificent, much better than the early freestone peaches that I bought in early summer just to taste. When bottled or stewed, the taste takes me back to childhood when a special treat was a tin of cling peaches for dessert.  One casualty of the wet spring of 2012 was the nectarine tree which, despite several sprays of  fungicide at bud burst, was really badly affected by curly leaf. This meant the entire crop consisted of about 8 nectarines. Perhaps that was a good thing as what would I have done with more?

I seem to find ripe passionfruit on the ground every time I walk past the Nelly Kelly vine.  We are now onto our 3rd and 4th apple trees almost ripe while there is still a big box of the Cox’s Orange Pippen in the cheese fridge/mini coolroom.  And finally the raspberries are now onto their second crop for the year and I am picking every couple of days. What more is there to do but make a fruit salad of a mixture of everything that is ripe.

With the windfall apples I have been making juice and cider with the second hand juicer I bought recently . This replaces the one I have had for 30 years which although still working, is not the best design for large amounts of fruit. I am hoping that kiwi fruit juice is tasty as I see that as an easy fruit to juice when the huge crop starts to ripen in the couple of months.

Sensational Sour Cherry Strudel and a Peach Glut, March 19th 2013

Last week, after watching a first episode in the new series of Gourmet Farmer on SBS,  I was inspired to start using some of the frozen Morello cherries that I picked in January. Matthew Evans met up with a friend ,originally from Croatia, who showed him how to make a sour cherry strudel. Seemed a simple recipe other than having to deal with fiddly filo pastry so I gave it a go on the weekend. The filo was fiddly as predicted but who cares when the result tastes so good. Sour cherry would have to be one of my most favourite flavours! Yummmmm!  I can see this recipe becoming an all time favourite.

I was busy bottling tomato paste and drying tomatoes on the weekend but one new thing that I tried was making peach leather. The peaches are rapidly ripening on the tree so I am going to have to come up with some uses for them. This peach and passionfruit leather looks and tastes nice.

 I also made a peach and walnut cake for my book club last night.....looks nice and tastes that way as well.  There seem to be millions of peach cake recipes on the net so just picking one was difficult. This one came from a site called Foodnetwork.  

Plenty of Pickles , February 26th 2013

Its pickling time....the vege garden is exploding with produce so I need to do something with it all. This weekend I have made two types of pickles. First up I made pickled red cabbage – salting the cabbage and sliced onion overnight before bringing a pickling vinegar to the boil and  pouring over the jar packed with the washed brined cabbage. I don’t think I have tried this recipe before which has raisins and orange zest in the vinegar. Now I am looking forward to tasting it.

 Next day it was time to make bread and butter pickles from some small crunchy cucumbers.

 Again it involved salting the cucumber and onion overnight before rinsing off the salt next morning. The cucumbers are brought to the boil in the pickling vinegar before packing into the jar. 

Each lot of pickles has a different mix of spices so I won't know what they taste like until I get around to opening the jars. I have several recipes of these types of pickles so making and tasting them all could take a long time.

Plum Worcestershire Sauce and some dehydrated goodies for a hike. February 12th 2013

The plums are finished except for a few in the fridge. On the weekend, I made some Plum Worcestershire Sauce with a mix of Damson and Satsuma plums. Even though I halved the recipe, I still ended up with probably more bottles than I will use in a year.  It was very easy to make – just boil all the following ingredients for 3 hours until it thickens slightly. Strain and bottle.

 750g of plums to 2 cups of treacle, 10 cups malt vinegar,65g salt, 65g garlic, 375g brown sugar, 65g bruised ginger,30g cloves, 15g allspice berries and ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper.

 While the sauce was boiling, I was busy preparing pre-cooked meals to dehydrate for an upcoming hike. I bought a book recently called Backpack Gourmet which is full of new ideas for dehydrated goodies to take on a hike. We now need to go on lots of hikes to try out all the recipes! On the weekend  I made 2 dehydrated pastes to have with rice cakes for lunch. One used tinned tuna, white beans and tomato paste or salsa blended together then dehydrated.

The other ,Backpack Bruschetta, was a mix of garlic,white beans,tomato puree, lemon juice, salt and pepper. When we want to eat them, we just mix with a little water. I also cooked up some pasta and dehydrated it to go with some dehydrated bolognaise sauce sitting in the freezer, left over from last year’s hikes.  Last weekend I made a Chilli Turkey dinner with couscous for one of our dehydrated dinners.  As the meal is already cooked, all you have to do is to cover it with water and bring to the boil. It sure beats soaking and cooking individual dehydrated ingredients out in the wilderness as I used to.

                                                   There is still lots to do out in the garden. The zucchinis and squash are going crazy and I have making jars of zucchini/squash pickles, making zucchini slice, grilling them on the BBQ and still they keep coming. Luckily the chooks like to peck on the big ones. Here are the ones from last weekend that got away from me.

And then of course, you just have to leave some time for a few swims at my local beach to make the most of the warm summer weather. :)

Enjoying the summer berry harvest ............Sunday January 13, 2013

Happy New Year - my first blog post of 2013.

The blueberry bird cage that we build late last year has really paid off with lots of blueberries ripening each day. I have been  picking every second day for the past couple of weeks and apart from freezing some, have just been enjoying the blueberries eaten fresh - the best way to have them.

The raspberries have been ripening madly too and I have had to pick them almost daily to keep up with the crop. This weekend I have sat some in vinegar to brew for the week so that I can make some raspberry vinegar next weekend. After 6 days of sitting in vinegar, the raspberries are strained and then the liquid brought to the boil with an equal amount of suger. Makes a delicious salad dressing. There are plenty of raspberries sitting in the freezer too until I decide what to do with them. Jam, syrup, cordial are on the agenda at some stage when it gets cold and there isn't the motivation to be outside.